Château Pontet-Canet: Guy, Alfred and Jean-Michel
Château Pontet-Canet has greatly changed under the direction of the Tesseron family. It has perhaps not quite been a revolution as such, although it sometimes feels like it. But there is a saying in show business, that it takes ten year’s hard work to become an overnight success, and this adage seems to describe the sequence of events at Pontet-Canet very nicely (provided we accept it is more like fifteen or twenty years than ten). Until recently almost universally derided, today it enjoys new-found status as an honorary super-second estate, a moniker that doesn’t quite fit as Château Pontet-Canet is of course challenging from the fifth tier of the 1855 classification, not the second.
Over the last twenty years we have seen the Tesseron family, led for much of this time by Alfred Tesseron (assisted by his niece Melanie and more recently by his daughter Justine) and aided by technical director Jean-Michel Comme (who has since retired) drive forward a programme of innovation and improvement that has seen quality soar at Château Pontet-Canet. It is certainly worth examining just how this team dragged this estate to the forefront of all Bordeaux.
Aware of the change that was sweeping through Bordeaux during the 1980s and 1990s, witnessed first hand in the vineyards and cellars of his neighbours, Alfred Tesseron (pictured) was eager to keep pace. In 1989 he appointed Jean-Michel Comme as manager, and together the pair devised a programme of work to rescue Château Pontet-Canet.
